AWESOME-tober-fest 2016: Asher Cobb from The Sixth Gun

Today I’m going to talk about a specific mummy character from one of my favorite comic series, The Sixth Gun, by Cullen Bunn and Brian Hurtt.

The comic is a horror western about six cursed pistols and the battle between good and evil to possess the guns and prevent them from destroying and remaking the world. There’s so much stuff running through this comic like gunfighters, undead Civil War generals, dark swamp gods, skinwalkers, black magic, ghosts and a 9 foot tall mummy. It really is worth a read and I can’t recommend it enough. The series as a whole ended this year with issue #50 and I recently did a re-read of the entire series from Book 1 up to the final issue and I loved every bit of it. The comic really gets deep into its own mythology and I really liked how it ended.

Anyway, the part of this comic I want to discuss today is the aforementioned 9 foot tall mummy. His name is Asher Cobb.

Asher first shows up in the series in the collected edition Book 3: Bound. Specifically in the final page of issue #12.

He shows up out of nowhere and steals the coffin containing the undead corpse of the evil General Hume. He fights spectacularly for the next issue and a half. Then, in issue #14, we finally get his origin as told to us by an old carnie.

Asher Cobb was born deformed. He was oversized, which made him an outcast. To add to that, he also received visions. Visions of the future. He was befriended only by a nice girl named Ruth who he fell in love with. One day he received a terrible vision of Ruth’s death. So to prevent the death of the girl he loved, he sought out some old witches and made a devil’s bargain to cheat death. But to do that, he had to endure death.

Unfortunately Asher was not able to prevent Ruth’s death so he is constantly wandering, driven crazy by his unnaturally long life and the knowledge that he couldn’t prevent Ruth’s death. He is at first used by the forces of evil as a tool, but Asher would show up much later helping out the good guys and hoping that whomever acquired the guns and remade the world, would also bring back his beloved Ruth.

Asher is a pretty great character, both in the story but also visually. He is super strong, gets visions of the future and just looks awesome. He’s just one of the reasons I love this comic.